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The Yellow Machine in Review
So, the machine itself is, well, uh, cute. Bright yellow, good clear display lights so that you can see traffic on the different drives. The drives themselves are IDE drives, so yeah, you don't get the speed of SCSI, but frankly, if you are looking for 1.6 TB of SCSI, you probably need to look at jbods or the like. But since the unit is really designed to be an office storage environment, that's probably just fine.
Feature-wise, the unit has almost everything that you want. What is interesting to me, that I haven't seen in many NAS units is that it's got a double firewall. The interface for handling network isn't quite as nice, as say, a wireless unit, but it's decent. You can have the machine sit as your connection to your WAN (it handles DHCP, static IP) do port-forwarding and all those other fun things. The primary problem that I had was actually the config of first getting it setup, but that didn't take much time once I actually read the manual. *grin* It will also do web-access controls for users, monitor e-mails sent, a whole slew of other stuff.
The network support is robust. It does SMB/NFS, and supports Windows and Mac as desktop clients, and does indeed work under Linux as well based on my testing. All of the interface work is done via HTTP so as long as you've got a somewhat recent flavor of web browser, you'll be dandy although it's optimized for IE6. The unit is surprisingly quiet - many times, while I was at my desk (it sat under there) I forgot it was there and kicked it over. It still works fine after that, BTW.
In terms of speed and performance, nothing hugely different then normal network file transfers, but that's more a function of network traffic/speed then anything else. The device handled multiple people using (it has permissions built-in) easily, and did uploads & downloads of big VOB files, MP3 directories, normal files - it shrugged it off. The major issue is pricing; the 1 TB is about $1300. Now, for the DIY crowd, yes, using Linux you could very easily put together a RAID 5, 1 TB machine for not that much more -- and you are probably going to do it anyway. But for the target market, especially situations in which the IT resources are limited, it's a great machine for the ease of setting it up. And since it supports doing automated back-ups as well as has the serial port to work with a UPS system, you don't have to worry about the whole crapping out and losing all of your data. All in all, a great unit. Price is a concern, but a minor one.
8/10 :)
I am not going to try and understand the next few paragraphs of a review that starts with
"with the all RAID fun and such."
What in the hell does that mean?
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
"We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions"
Parse Error at line 1.
Core Dump...
Yellow Box love you LONG time!
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The major issue is pricing; the 1 TB is about $1300.
Price is a concern, but a minor one.
So.. You think it's a cute looking box? I think so too. In my opinion, it's quite ugly. Very pretty, if I may say so.
This machine's design reminds me of a toaster. They should put the floppy drive on top so it would really look like one that toasts floppies
You just got troll'd!
Nowhere on their site does is list any support for remote authentication. If I need a cheep solution I will set up an old desktop running Linux and get a SATA RAID card.
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
30 NOV 05: Not content with mere duplicate stories, Hemos started posting incoherent ramblings.
$1300 isn't exactly expensive for an 1tb NAS device.
If I understand correctly, the user manual states that the appliance uses the Linux kernel... if this is so, has anyone found a link on their web-site to any GPL'd code included with the software updates?
Well, the review was super froody! Yeah, you know Linux was mentioned and that was neat. I read it on a pretty modern webbrowser, but I suppose that IE would've been great, too.
D ataSheet.pdf -- or even the basic breakdown: http://www.anthologysolutions.com/products/index.h tm ) then, hey give this rather cute review a shot!
The reviewer spent some time talking about things, which was cool in my book. At one point, I actually considered looking into one of the technical things mentioned, but didn't as it would've broken the flavor of the review.
All in all, it was a pretty fun review -- I had some laughs and a couple of good cries. For the DIY crowd, you could google the info yourself -- which, you'll probably do anyhow. But for the Suits who want to spend some money and not learn much (much less than say... the spec sheet: http://www.anthologysolutions.com/products/P400T_
Thanks for the darling review. I feel much peppier now. =/
#SickNotWeak
Kano Technologies
I got the Infrant Redy NAS, it's a pretty nice machine. they have a new verison X6 that lets you incramentally upgrade your drives and automatically resizes your volume. It's also nice to buy the machine with no drives and upgrade that when you can afford it.
If you don't modify the original you don't have to distribute the source youself, you only have to distribute the source to any changes or derrivatives. See the GPL for details. Specifically:
This means all they need to do is provide a link to kernel.org
These "sentences" are embarrassing. What happened to proofreading? Seriously, you guys beg for test hardware to play with, and then you write a review that's barely English? Come on. We all have deadlines, but is it too much to ask that the editor proofread his own work to make sure it's coherent?
rooooar
The major issue is pricing; the 1 TB is about $1300.
Price is a concern, but a minor one.
So, which is it?
dennis
Geez, I know I don't pay for a subscription, and I know SlashDot doesn't claim to be any kind of professional writing at all, but...
When your website's one-and-only purpose for existing is to communicate information, don't you think it's worth at least minor efforts to avoid miscommunication like this?
It's really not that hard, either. You could probably find a highly qualified copyeditor or three who could do such small piece-work on demand from home for a very modest fee. Or, if you have zero budget for improving quality, simply having each non-professional writer require a careful reading of their piece from one or two of the other non-professional writers there before posting ought to prevent complete garbage like this sentence from making it in.
Please consider doing something to improve your process. Some mistakes are funny, but total opacity is not so entertaining.
I saw one of these at a place I worked at:Buffalo systems ... little less flashy on the presentation but nonetheless does its job... also with a 1Tb at $1000, i think it's a better deal
OBLIVION!-
This hope I helps.
I don't really think anyone in the slashdot crowd expected it to not do that.
Generally, a hardware review contains at least some sort of benchmarks or some gauge of performance. The closest you came to this was "I kicked it and it didn't break" and "It was kind of easy to use."
If you're going to review hardware, why don't you look up some other reviews for related hardware and try to structure yours in a similar manner. That way, you might actually offer some useful information.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
When I first read the words "about the size of a ups box" I pictured one of those big brown metal boxes you put packages in for pickup by UPS.
If I wanted something that huge for storage, I'd get an AS/400.
So I'm sorry I misunderstood you Hemos. When you said UPS box, you meant UPS box, not UPS box. My mistake.
Go to your local community college and take an English class.
It was just so bad, I had to sig it.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I also reviewed this machine in an article on TomsNetworking. My review included fun things like pulling the power from one of the RAID drives while streaming a movie, comparative performance graphs, etc.
Here's my review.
It would sound better if you sang "Yellow RAID Machine."
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
Here is a quote of their conclusion: For my money, looks like I'll be investigating other products, first.
/dev/random
It isn't running Windows Vista! It's Communist!
/. even interviewed the author and confirmed this!
Windows Vista outsells Linux RAID! Laura DiDio said so and you know she wouldn't lie!
We just did an independent study proving that a 10/100 Ethernet connection outperforms Gigabit in achieving small office business targets!
If you don't buy this machine, we'll stop selling to your country and pull all our employees out and tell George about you!
Wait until the next version! It'll be awesome! You'll be able to actually search the drive!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Why would you put a NAS and a firewall/router on the same piece of hardware? I'm looking at NAS solutions right now and the LAST place I would put 1TB of corporate data is within reach of the T1.
Nice product by the looks of it, but I can't see myself ever buying one.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
The size shouldn't matter anyway, as you can put it anywhere you want - the cable that it comes with is as long as a piece of string!
You forgot obviously commercial advertisements masquerading as reviews by Chinese PR agents who can't speak (or write) English.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
That is $498,000 cheaper then other vendors
Right now, RAID6 is starting to gain popularity in high-availability environments.
With basic RAID5, the array can handle a single drive failure and can only detect odd errors with no possibility of correcting them. With RAID5+1, a hot-spare is available to start unattended rebuild when a failure occurs but costs and extra drive while still leaving the array vulnerable to a second failure during the rebuild process. With RAID6, error-correcting codes are generated for the N extra (non-data) drives to provide N/2 bits error correction, multi-bits error detection and recovery of up to N erasures/failures.
RAID6 is more computationnally expensive than RAID5 but it can be made arbitrarily resilient to subtle soft errors typical RAID5 would never detect. An external box 6xSATA/NCQ RAID6 with SATA-3G-uplink storage controller would be a nice companion for anybody who takes data integrity seriously but does not want to do TB-scale backups. (Of course, this still leaves data vulnerable to infection-induced or otherwise accidental trashing.)
First off, who wrote this review? Sounds to me like an Anthology Solutions employee trying to be all slashdotty.
I just looked at the specs for this and am not that impressed. Like many other NAS devices, they claim OS/X support, but support is not via AFP. Though their docs make no mention of it, the YellowMachine is almost certainly running SAMBA only, and OS/X support is also through SAMBA. The problem with this is primarily long filenames. Try backing up your music collection to a SMB/CIFS box, and you'll see what I mean. IMHO, if you don't have AFP support, then you don't support Macs.
Similarly, there's no support for rsync or (given what Tom's Networking has to say) file access via FTP or HTTP. And this may be just me, but who wants a router, DHCP server, a firewall, and a proxy server embedded in a NAS box? And $1300? That's cheap?
I recently purchased a RAID enabled SOHO NAS appliance. I spent a long time figuring out exactly what was needed in a mixed OS/X, Windows, Linux environment. I picked the Infrant ReadyNAS box. You can see my blog entry on this subject for details as to why. In short: support for SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, rsync, webdav, and FTP. Support for UPS devices. Support for Gigabit Ethernet. Very good documentation and an even better (employee active) user forum. And I got a TB of storage (650MB after RAID 5 formatting) for $1,000.
Mebbe if it had a gigabit ethernet port.
Otherwise, it's kinda not quite there.
Firewire and gigE are both pretty cheap these days. There's no good reason that a box like this can't have that kind of thruput. NAS doesn't have to mean slow as a snail. They could dump the 8-port switch or just have different model options.
This could be really sweet as a MythTV repository otherise.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"Worst /. Story of 2005"
This story is currently nominated for "Worst Slashdot Story of 2005" and unless a Katrina-scale woofer of a story comes along in the next month, this little slice of junior-high blather will easily take the prize. I wonder if Hemos actually _read_ this story before posting it? (Hemos: did you write this? Or just post it?) As many others have pointed out, the first sentence doesn't even parse in English! I might be wrong, but I'm assuming that Hemos' native language is English because most of the not-english-as-first-language-having folks I've met can express themselves MUCH better than Americans who grew up with English. Not meaning to flame Americans (I'm from Mississippi after all...) but the state of written communication in the USA seems to be declining proportionally to the rise in blogging.
This sig kills fascists.
Wow, this shows a level of idiocy I would not have thought possible. After the first time kicking it over, the thought should have come up, "CRAP! That's a terrible place to keep that. I should move it to somewhere more out of the way, where it won't get knocked over all the time."
"Whoa, that's the fourth time I've knocked that thing over. I'll bet I've learned my lesson now."
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds